In a country where nearly a third of under-fives are anaemic, a lack of vegetables has contributed to poor health and high cancer rates. Now, that’s beginning to change as tomatoes, cucumber and celery are cultivated
- Photographs by Byamba-Ochir
Carrots, cabbages and potatoes were the only vegetables ever served up to Zina Zaya. Never as a child, but in the canteen of the factory where she worked as a seamstress in the 1970s. Vegetables were hard to come by in the Mongolian People’s Republic, she recalls, and work lunches were for decades the only time she saw vegetables, and only those three.
But now, aged 76, an impressively large greenhouse stands outside Zaya’s ger, a traditional Mongolian circular felt tent. She lives there with her daughter, Naranchimeg, and grows tomatoes and cucumbers, celery, a wide array of greens – including Naranchimeg’s favourite, broccoli – and more than 10 other varieties.
